Plan Your Trip Times Picks

The Talk: Icons; Martial Plan

By Herbert Muschamp

Published: May 20, 2007

This summer may be your last opportunity to see the Cyclorama Center, the 1962 visitors' center designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander overlooking the battlefields of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. The building is scheduled for demolition within the next two years. A new visitors center will occupy a structure designed to simulate a round barn from ''ye olde days'' -- an oddly Virginian conceit for a site where General Lee's army went down to bloody defeat.

Let's not read too much into that.

You don't have to enter the Cyclorama to appreciate its considerable merit. The building is a time capsule from a period of optimism about the capacity of humans to settle their disputes by civil means. Its present state of dilapidation all too aptly symbolizes the decay of that post-World War II ideal.

As much a work of landscape design as a piece of architecture, the building is gently nestled in its surroundings. The trees of Ziegler's Grove partly screen the tallest part of the structure, an opaque drum of white concrete. Rough stone piers smooth the transition from the building to the ground. The drum is counterpoised to a lower office wing, clad in glass, that stretches out on the sloping land like a bridge from the present toward the past.

Neutra was the ideal architect to design the Cyclorama. A native of Vienna, where he was a schoolmate and close friend of Freud's son Ernst, Neutra regarded architecture as a form of therapy. He is best known for residential works in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, Calif. Sylvia Lavin's book ''Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture'' (The MIT Press) describes how these buildings embodied Neutra's belief in the healing powers of mortar and stone.

In 1959, Neutra's adopted country invited him to treat the body politic. Commissioned by the National Park Service as part of a massive upgrading of the parks system, the Cyclorama was conceived as a living memorial to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In addition to housing an information center and museum, the building was designed to function as a stage. A speaker's rostrum was placed behind a wall of sliding glass panels on the ground level. It faced a slope of grass that formed a natural amphitheater where an audience of several thousand could gather for special events.

Neutra, with the endorsement of the Park Service, envisioned leaders addressing topics relevant to world peace on the anniversary of Lincoln's oration. The clear message was that those who perished at Gettysburg had given their lives not only to restore the Union but also to support the peaceful resolution of conflicts into the future, and on a global scale. Since this concept was consistent with the postwar ethos that had given rise to the United Nations, it stood to reason that the building would be designed in a similar modern idiom.

The decision to demolish the Cyclorama Center was made in 1999. Efforts to preserve it have been led by groups including the World Monuments Fund, the Recent Past Preservation Network, Docomomo and Preservation Pennsylvania. It is not hard to fathom why the Park Service has turned a deaf ear. Neutra was from Venus. Gettysburg's place on the map of history was inscribed by Mars. In this sense, and only this sense, those who favor demolition are being responsibly contextual.

Those who favor demolishing the structure draw from the same inventory of clich?that often appear when someone wants to annihilate a modern building: the building is functionally obsolete, architecturally undistinguished, inappropriate to its site and so on. I don't doubt that people believe these things. Fifty years ago, when people wanted to tear down Beaux-Arts buildings, they believed they were white elephants.

The preservation movement emerged, in fact, to protect us from beliefs that become entrenched with changing taste. More to the point, we are living in Martian times. A Park Service capable of selling books that present a creationist view of the Grand Canyon is unlikely to look favorably on a structure designed to deter the prospect of an apocalyptic End of Days. A Martian would be particularly suspicious of Neutra's building, because its Venusian character is spatially coded by the design itself.

The Cyclorama Center takes its name, location and part of its shape from the panoramic 1884 painting of the Battle of Gettysburg, by the French artist Paul Philippoteaux. The painting is now being restored and will be reinstated in the new visitors' center. Placed within the round concrete drum, it depicts Pickett's Charge as an observer might have witnessed it were he standing near the very spot where the drum rises today. The 360-degree canvas is a stirring example of military site-specific art, with its galloping steeds, riders contorted with purpose and pain, and clouds of the gunpowder smoke that hung in the humid July air more than seven-score years ago.

But the mayhem has been contained. Neutra has walled it up, seemingly alive, as if aggression itself is an evil genie that has been cajoled into a jar. The roof of the office wing is paved to form an elongated viewing platform. A ramp leads from the roof down to the ground and to a walk not solely across a battlefield, but in a rolling pastoral landscape where nature has healed the scars of war.

Reminders of the dead stud this placid corner of earth: statues of officers and regular soldiers; stones of irregular size and design commemorating regiments, many of them listing the number of casualties. The fanciful effect is of a suburban store for garden ornaments designed by Edward Gorey, an impression I admire. But I can imagine that certain Park Service employees might be disturbed to have this vista constantly before their eyes: ''I see dead people -- everywhere.''

Neutra's building is a ghost also, a specter possibly more haunting than the others for the contemporary imagination. Gettysburg is dedicated to the idea that the soldiers gave their lives for a good cause. But the Cyclorama is a monument to a good cause that died for no good reason. Like many works of postwar architecture, it sits in judgment on a society that has gone far toward dismantling the framework of Enlightenment values that once made this country attractive in the eyes of the world. Since it's painful to be reminded of our own broken promises, we may as well dismantle the memories too.

For more information about the Cyclorama Center and efforts to preserve it, as well as images of its interior and exterior, go to www.mission66.com, www.wmf.org and www.neutra.org. The case for the demolition of the Cyclorama is at www.gettysburgfoundation.org; details about the proposed new center and visiting Gettysburg are at www.nps.gov.

DRAWING (DRAWING BY MAIRA KALMAN)

Book FlightsBook A HotelRent A CarBook A CruiseBook A PackageBook An Activity